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Book Challenge #25: Graceling, by Kristin Cashore
In the seven kingdoms of Graceling, some children develop eyes of two different colors—and those children will grow up to have extraordinary talents. Some are unparalleled cooks, some are inhumanly skilled acrobats, some can do complicated math in their heads, instantly. These people, called Gracelings, are given to the service of their country's royal family, where they use their skills to the benefit of the king.
Katsa has one blue eye and one green eye, and her Grace is killing. She is the weapon of her uncle, King Randa—and she hates it: hates being a killer, hates that he uses her to hurt and scare his people, hates that everyone looks at her with fear. So she decides, secretly, to use her power to help people instead of hurt them, which in turn embroils her in her country's politics.
My favorite thing about this book was Katsa: she is incredibly competent at some things (one of those being 'hurting and killing people,' to her dismay), but she's also incredibly not-competent at some other things, like understanding people and getting along with them. She's sharp and prickly, expects people to be afraid of her (and to some extent is afraid of them, not that they'll hurt her physically but that they'll act in ways she doesn't understand and can't control), tends towards isolation, and is kinder than she can give herself credit for. She's a good person, but not a particularly friendly one, and I liked that. I also liked that, while she has plenty of flaws and places where she's not the best ever, she gets to be super skilled at what she is super skilled at without being taken down a notch. (It also helps that, although she's supremely skilled, the challenges that the plot throws at her are appropriate for her skills. She still can't breeze through them.) And she gets more and more agency through the book, including through her romance subplot, which I liked.
I also liked her love interest, but I'll have to talk more about that behind the spoiler wall.
The Graces were a very interesting thing, too—similar to many other takes on 'magical powers granted at birth,' but with a few interesting twists. For one thing, just because you're Graced with something doesn't mean you like it. Someone Graced with cooking might very well hate cooking, just as Katsa, Graced with killing, isn't herself a sociopathic murderer. For another thing, the plot really does face the bad side of having some people born with incredible powers; when someone monstrous winds up with a strong Grace, the results are horrifying. (This is also something I liked in How To Ditch Your Fairy, which I'll write about later.) It was a nice change from books in which mages clearly could take over the world, but for some reason just... don't.
The book was not without flaws. While the prose style was very clean and readable, it fell flat in places, and sometimes seemed unpolished. (I am pleased to say that Fire is better in this regard; I think Cashore is learning as she goes, which makes sense for a first and second book.) The worldbuilding also felt generic medievalesque (heck, the countries are named Wester, Estill, Nander, Sunder, and Middluns, if that gives you an idea), with the exception of the Graces. Actually, one country -- Lienid -- gets more detail than the others, and I liked it better but I'm afraid the more detail there threw the flatter worldbuilding in the rest of the world into sharper relief. I think I am getting pickier about generic medievaloid—I don't mind medieval, as long as it has some actual flavor, rather than just horses-and-castles-okay-we're-done. But the flaws were minor enough that they didn't take away from what I loved, which was the characters.
This is a book that I think really merits from being unspoiled, so unless you've already read it or you're pretty sure you won't read the book, I'd avoid reading on.
I loved loved loved the romance between Katsa and Po. It really worked for me, with the two of them very very different and yet still drawn to each other and good for each other. And the romantic conflict made sense to me: I found Katsa's unwillingness to get married and have children completely plausible and sympathetic, and I also really sympathized with her being creeped the hell out that Po could always tell what she was thinking about him. So, while she struggled against being in love with him, and didn't want to feel it or give in to it, she did so with reasons that were perfectly understandable. (As opposed to the all-too-common 'I can't give in to being in love because then the romantic subplot will be very shot' reason.) Anyway, the pairing hit a lot of good shippy buttons for me. Not least of which is that I love it when it's the female character who's the tough, prickly, lone-wolf one and the male character who's the sociable one and the social-wheel-greaser and the one who talks about feelings.
I also really liked that she didn't wind up married at the end, and had no plan to do so.
In a lot of ways, this book was satisfying to me because it's a fantasy of teenage girl agency. There's a bit early in the book that I identified a lot with—a relative of hers gave her a creepy compliment (creepy in the sense of sexual harassment), and her Grace manifests and she accidentally kills him. After which everyone says of her, "She killed him just for complimenting her eyes!", which is not what went on (for one thing, there was a lot more subtext in it than that, and for another, she didn't kill him because of anything -- it was an accident caused by the manifestation of her Grace). And yet the comments are entirely plausible to me: I've had the situation where someone hit on me in a way that was skeevy and slimy and I turned them down curtly and left... only to have other people explain that the guy was "just" complimenting me, and I should have been "nice." While I certainly wouldn't kill creepy guys at clubs, even if I could, it made me identify a lot with Katsa. (And oh boy, made me wish I had a survival Grace so that I would never have to worry about it!)
And I also love that, although Katsa deals with bigger and bigger threats throughout the book, and things get harder and harder for her, her character arc is one of more and more agency. She starts out feeling trapped into being her uncle's weapon, and finally realizes (with the help of friends) that she's more powerful than her uncle and can just walk away... and it goes on from there. I liked that. She is challenged because things get harder, not because she gets weaker.
Katsa has a super strong Grace (we find out later that her grace isn't killing but survival; it's just that, in a fight, killing or maiming someone who's threatening you is an element of survival), but the challenges she gets are at the correct level for a super strong Grace. She can survive in almost any wilderness... and so she has to climb a giant mountain range, with poor equipment, while carrying a child! (Er, I mean, while carrying a child physically in her arms, not while pregnant.) She can deal with almost any physical threat... so the main antagonist is a mind-controller whose threat is purely mental, against which she has very little defense! They make her successes actually feel like real successes, even if you take into consideration her Grace.
The political plot was extremely straightforward. Some readers might find that to be a problem, but to be perfectly honest, I don't. I read for character and worldbuilding, and so if a plot is just a framework for characters I like, then I'm fine with it. Mileage varies on this point, obviously. There was one plot-arc thing that I didn't like so well, though, and that was that the denouement went on what felt like a bit too long. I felt like Katsa shaking off the mind control and killing the evil king was the true climax of the book, and, as much as I loved Katsa and Po's interactions, the bit at the end with them in the forest felt like too much after the fact.
Recommended, especially if you like light-ish YA fantasy. This is one of the books that I read in one evening, and I grabbed the next book (which is actually a prequel) as soon as it came out.
Katsa has one blue eye and one green eye, and her Grace is killing. She is the weapon of her uncle, King Randa—and she hates it: hates being a killer, hates that he uses her to hurt and scare his people, hates that everyone looks at her with fear. So she decides, secretly, to use her power to help people instead of hurt them, which in turn embroils her in her country's politics.
My favorite thing about this book was Katsa: she is incredibly competent at some things (one of those being 'hurting and killing people,' to her dismay), but she's also incredibly not-competent at some other things, like understanding people and getting along with them. She's sharp and prickly, expects people to be afraid of her (and to some extent is afraid of them, not that they'll hurt her physically but that they'll act in ways she doesn't understand and can't control), tends towards isolation, and is kinder than she can give herself credit for. She's a good person, but not a particularly friendly one, and I liked that. I also liked that, while she has plenty of flaws and places where she's not the best ever, she gets to be super skilled at what she is super skilled at without being taken down a notch. (It also helps that, although she's supremely skilled, the challenges that the plot throws at her are appropriate for her skills. She still can't breeze through them.) And she gets more and more agency through the book, including through her romance subplot, which I liked.
I also liked her love interest, but I'll have to talk more about that behind the spoiler wall.
The Graces were a very interesting thing, too—similar to many other takes on 'magical powers granted at birth,' but with a few interesting twists. For one thing, just because you're Graced with something doesn't mean you like it. Someone Graced with cooking might very well hate cooking, just as Katsa, Graced with killing, isn't herself a sociopathic murderer. For another thing, the plot really does face the bad side of having some people born with incredible powers; when someone monstrous winds up with a strong Grace, the results are horrifying. (This is also something I liked in How To Ditch Your Fairy, which I'll write about later.) It was a nice change from books in which mages clearly could take over the world, but for some reason just... don't.
The book was not without flaws. While the prose style was very clean and readable, it fell flat in places, and sometimes seemed unpolished. (I am pleased to say that Fire is better in this regard; I think Cashore is learning as she goes, which makes sense for a first and second book.) The worldbuilding also felt generic medievalesque (heck, the countries are named Wester, Estill, Nander, Sunder, and Middluns, if that gives you an idea), with the exception of the Graces. Actually, one country -- Lienid -- gets more detail than the others, and I liked it better but I'm afraid the more detail there threw the flatter worldbuilding in the rest of the world into sharper relief. I think I am getting pickier about generic medievaloid—I don't mind medieval, as long as it has some actual flavor, rather than just horses-and-castles-okay-we're-done. But the flaws were minor enough that they didn't take away from what I loved, which was the characters.
This is a book that I think really merits from being unspoiled, so unless you've already read it or you're pretty sure you won't read the book, I'd avoid reading on.
I loved loved loved the romance between Katsa and Po. It really worked for me, with the two of them very very different and yet still drawn to each other and good for each other. And the romantic conflict made sense to me: I found Katsa's unwillingness to get married and have children completely plausible and sympathetic, and I also really sympathized with her being creeped the hell out that Po could always tell what she was thinking about him. So, while she struggled against being in love with him, and didn't want to feel it or give in to it, she did so with reasons that were perfectly understandable. (As opposed to the all-too-common 'I can't give in to being in love because then the romantic subplot will be very shot' reason.) Anyway, the pairing hit a lot of good shippy buttons for me. Not least of which is that I love it when it's the female character who's the tough, prickly, lone-wolf one and the male character who's the sociable one and the social-wheel-greaser and the one who talks about feelings.
I also really liked that she didn't wind up married at the end, and had no plan to do so.
In a lot of ways, this book was satisfying to me because it's a fantasy of teenage girl agency. There's a bit early in the book that I identified a lot with—a relative of hers gave her a creepy compliment (creepy in the sense of sexual harassment), and her Grace manifests and she accidentally kills him. After which everyone says of her, "She killed him just for complimenting her eyes!", which is not what went on (for one thing, there was a lot more subtext in it than that, and for another, she didn't kill him because of anything -- it was an accident caused by the manifestation of her Grace). And yet the comments are entirely plausible to me: I've had the situation where someone hit on me in a way that was skeevy and slimy and I turned them down curtly and left... only to have other people explain that the guy was "just" complimenting me, and I should have been "nice." While I certainly wouldn't kill creepy guys at clubs, even if I could, it made me identify a lot with Katsa. (And oh boy, made me wish I had a survival Grace so that I would never have to worry about it!)
And I also love that, although Katsa deals with bigger and bigger threats throughout the book, and things get harder and harder for her, her character arc is one of more and more agency. She starts out feeling trapped into being her uncle's weapon, and finally realizes (with the help of friends) that she's more powerful than her uncle and can just walk away... and it goes on from there. I liked that. She is challenged because things get harder, not because she gets weaker.
Katsa has a super strong Grace (we find out later that her grace isn't killing but survival; it's just that, in a fight, killing or maiming someone who's threatening you is an element of survival), but the challenges she gets are at the correct level for a super strong Grace. She can survive in almost any wilderness... and so she has to climb a giant mountain range, with poor equipment, while carrying a child! (Er, I mean, while carrying a child physically in her arms, not while pregnant.) She can deal with almost any physical threat... so the main antagonist is a mind-controller whose threat is purely mental, against which she has very little defense! They make her successes actually feel like real successes, even if you take into consideration her Grace.
The political plot was extremely straightforward. Some readers might find that to be a problem, but to be perfectly honest, I don't. I read for character and worldbuilding, and so if a plot is just a framework for characters I like, then I'm fine with it. Mileage varies on this point, obviously. There was one plot-arc thing that I didn't like so well, though, and that was that the denouement went on what felt like a bit too long. I felt like Katsa shaking off the mind control and killing the evil king was the true climax of the book, and, as much as I loved Katsa and Po's interactions, the bit at the end with them in the forest felt like too much after the fact.
Recommended, especially if you like light-ish YA fantasy. This is one of the books that I read in one evening, and I grabbed the next book (which is actually a prequel) as soon as it came out.
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I've heard a lot recently about both Graceling and The Hunger Games. I think I may try this one first.
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The Hunger Games is also very, very good, but the sequel seemed like a step down (not a huge step down, but still), whereas the prequel to Graceling felt like a step up, to me.
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It's a lot of fun -- what I think of as the perfect bedtime read: compelling, with great characters and some interesting ideas, familiar enough to be comforting, and short enough that if I get caught up and read it all in one night I won't be too screwed.
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I liked how different Fire was from Katsa. I like getting a range of different kinds of female characters.
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The basic premise is that some human remains are so destroyed that you need a lot of special skills to figure out who it was -- like gluing a hundred fragments back into a skull, and drawing what kind of face would have been over that shape of skull. There's the FBI agent, Boothe, who gets along well with most people and follows his gut (which is generally right), and Bones, who is hardcore scientist and socially awkward. It's a dramedy, and while fairly episodic, has enough awesome long term storylines that it's best to watch it in order (more long story arcs than Numbers or NCIS, less than Buffy or West Wing). It's fairly similar to Castle overall, but Bones has the awesome gender role swap. I could go on much longer, but it's probably better to watch a few episodes and see what you think. When I started watching it, I was intrigued right away, but I didn't fall in love with it until I'd finished the whole first season.
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I loved this, too. Especially because lack of agency among female teen protagonists is becoming something of an issue for me -- I'm less and less able to accept it, unless the author convinces me particularly well.
Also agreed that it's not a perfect book -- and that it didn't need to be, because what it did, it did very well, and so made for a fun and satisfying read. (This has been my writing lesson this decade. It's not about what the writer avoids doing wrong. It's about what they do do right.)